1 Album, 1 Book, 1 Movie: Vol. 1

Need some more structure in my life (both writing and otherwise), so trying to write once or week (or so) about a movie, a book, and an album I consumed in the previous seven days.

Stakes is High, De La Soul, 1996

I choose this mostly because I'd seen the title around (it's a well known album) and I was thinking about how a huge issue right now, in so many different areas of life and culture and politics, is that everything feels very high stakes. (I was thinking of dating discourse, where people are all "What if this is my last first date?" ahead of meeting up with a rando from Hinge. But also how every single thing happening right now feels like it might legitimately be the end of everything.) Stakes is, indeed, high. I considered using the title as a tossed-off reference in some larger piece. Being the person I am, however, I would never do that without first familiarizing myself with the source material. Like, did it even mean what I thought it meant?

I don't have much to say about this album other than I liked it and will keep listening to it.

The Trauma of Everyday Life, Mark Epstein, 2013

This is probably the fourth or fifth time I've read this book since I bought a copy from a used bookstore in the Hudson Valley in 2023: It's one of my favorites. I pick it up whenever I need not exactly a pick-me-up, but a reminder that struggle is normal and inevitable, that I'm not failing because I'm sad or depressed or going through a hard time. That is quite simply life.

Epstein, a prominent figure in American Buddhism and mindfulness as well as a practicing psychiatrist, uses the Buddha's loss of his mother in the first week of his life (a relatively overlooked aspect of Buddhist cosmology) as a lens through which to examine trauma and dissociation. In this examination, he draws heavily upon the work of D.W.Winnicott, an influential child psychiatrist from the first half of the 20th century who invented the concept of the "good enough" mother and who wrote extensively on the lifelong impact of developmental trauma -- what Winnicott calls "primitive agonies" -- on neglected (or "parentified") children. (You may be familiar with Winnicott from Allison Bechdel's -- in my opinion, pretty disappointing and solipsistic -- second graphic novel, Are You My Mother?) His ideas were further developed by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller in her 1979 book The Drama of the Gifted Child. He doesn't get a ton of credit these days, but his ideas are suffused throughout Instagram "healing" discourse, if imperfectly.

Epstein's book is one of the most cogent explications of Realistic View, one of the core tenets of Buddhism, that I have found. I discovered it during a very difficult time, when I was feeling unfairly beset by life. It allowed me to let go and accept that these things were happening because they were happening -- because the conditions were present for them to happen -- not because I had done something terrible or was a basically defective person.

When I mention the title, people sometimes laugh, I think because they presume the book might be about the traumaification of everything, about how social media encourages people to turn the smallest inconvenience into a total tragedy. But it's not about that at all. It was published in 2013, when the mainstreaming of "trauma" as the explanation for everything was in its very early stages. (Parul Sehgal's New Yorker piece, "The Case Against the Trauma Plot," was not published until 2021.) Instead, Epstein's point is that trauma is, in fact, all pervasive. The small inconvenience is not itself a tragedy, but our overwrought response to it may be about protecting ourselves from the implications of some earlier misfortune, whether that's an early encounter with violence or abuse, the loss of a crucial caregiver, or simply a lack of attunement from the one(s) you had. We build up neurotic defenses to protect us against the ultimately fleeting nature of our existence, to prop up what he calls the "daily absolutisms" -- for instance, the certainty that when we tell someone we will see them tomorrow, we actually will -- that allow us to go on as though everything is fine and normal, to continue to believe that we won't age and die, and to forget that loss and pain are inevitable.

Anyway, highly recommended.

The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, 2026

I purposely avoided reading any of the thinkpieces about this movie (including Emily Wilson's) mostly because I did not want to come into the film pre-exhausted by it.

I enjoyed it! I do not feel qualified to judge the appropriateness of Nolan's adaptation, nor can I say I have very strong feelings about how a work meant to spoken should be adapted to a visual medium. The only other adaptation of The Odyssey that I've seen is a 1997 miniseries that starred Armand Assante as Odysseus, which was, I'm sure, incredibly cheesy with laughable special effects.

Nolan does not seem like an ideal candidate for the job, and one could say that's reflected in the final film, but that didn't take away from my enjoyment of it. It makes me think a little bit -- and bear with me, I could be totally wrong -- of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. It's a great film with wonderful performances by Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah, but one can't say that Spielberg was the ideal director to bring it to the screen. It's got all these very Spielbergian touches -- even just the opening sequence! -- that do feel somewhat incongruous with the story and source material. Another director might have done it "better" but we will never know because, I imagine, Spielberg's interest in it is why it got made at all.(Update: Apparently not! Spielberg himself, according to Wikipedia, felt it was a bad fit.) Particularly at that time in his career (well before Schindler's List), when he was mostly known for making huge blockbusters about boyish men searching for sea creatures and space aliens, he was a strange choice for this literary adaptation about black women in the Deep South. Nonetheless, it's a great movie. Maybe a better movie could have been made, but the one we got is what exists.

Nolan, whose films seem to be logic puzzles or philosophical meditations, doesn't seem the perfect choice for bringing a Homeric epic to the screen. (But, who would be?) That said, it works? I felt the first half could have been shorter and that things really picked up once Odysseus went to Hades (and Elliot Page reappears). Everything was far too loud. (My friend and I were both, at various points, covering our ears. I'd recommend ear plugs if you are sensitive.) By contrast, at the end, I could barely hear Odysseus's final voiceover. In the muddle, I briefly wondered if Nolan was going to have him straight-up recite "Ulysses" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, which also has Odysseus setting out on a boat. We'd already had a mythic character who "existed" thousands of years before the birth of Christ say the Golden Rule, so why not? But, no, it's something about the end of the Bronze Age? My eardrums had been totally blown out by then, so I couldn't tell you.

The dialogue was stilted, to the point where I felt perhaps he was going for a formal theatrical style, but that was undercut by having Telemachus call Odysseus his "dad." I thought everyone was very well cast, except Zendaya, who has a face that has seen a cell phone. John Leguiziamo was wonderful. Robert Pattinson was very funny. Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, and Samantha Morton? Perfect. (Never mind that Hathaway is almost exactly as many years -- 13 or so -- older than her son, Tom Holland, as she is years younger than her husband, Matt Damon. She also looks 34.)

I will say that the previews that appeared before this film -- that Brad Pitt and a dog do Hatchet one, and some post-apocalyptic thing set in Denver starring Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley -- all looked terrible.